From the time Theodore Roosevelt was 8 years old and saw a dead seal in an open-air market in New York City, he was fascinated by the natural world. Theodore Roosevelt in the Field, the recent book by Michael R. Canfield, includes images of pages from many of the notebooks Roosevelt used to record his trips to watch—and hunt—birds and animals.

Walking through San Francisco's Chinatown in 1894, immigration officer John Lynch recorded the nature of the small businesses lining the ethnic enclave's streets and alleys. The National Archives has digitized the maps Lynch and other immigration investigators used to track the fish vendors, tailors, and restaurants found along streets like Washington Alley, which is mapped below.

American student Barbara Donahue (then Barbara Finlay) lived in Italy between August 1937 and March 1938, when she was 7 and 8 years old. She attended a Catholic school, the Istituto Vittoria Colonna, in Milan. There, she was issued these small soft-covered government-produced student notebooks, decorated with colorful, dramatic illustrations. (The Donahue family are long-time family friends; Barbara's son Bill showed me her collection of notebooks and allowed me to scan them.)

This interactive map, put together by the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the University of Georgia's eHistory initiative, uses the Library of Congress' database of historical newspapers, Chronicling America, to track frequency of keywords in newspapers and visualize the results across time and space.

Something that’s always bothered me about the Vault has been the way posts can end up feeling unconnected to a bigger historical picture. Sure, I try as hard as I can to write about the way each document fits into its period of origin, but the Internet is a relentless decontextualizer. If you found this blog through one of its popular posts, like the medicinal plants map of the United States or the CIA’s guide to workplace sabotage, it’s unlikely that you were able to browse documents from the same time period that I’d written about in the past—unless you were killing a lot of time at work that day.

These two very similar posters, copyrighted in Atlanta and published in Iowa around 1910, commemorate the Confederacy 50 years after its founding. Distributed as a promotional item by the First National Bank of Gainesville, Georgia, the first poster below incorporates portraits of Confederate leaders, a map, images of currency and memorials, and (on its reverse side) the lyrics to Confederate poems and songs.

CSI:Dixie, a beautifully conceived and profoundly mournful new digital history site, holds 1,582 digitized coroner's reports from six counties in 19th-century South Carolina. You can search by keyword or read lists that organize inquest files by the act that killed the person (homicide; suicide; infanticide;accidentnatural causes), clicking through to individual cases that fit that description. Three "Chronicles" tell deeper stories of individual inquests. Historian Stephen Berry, who created the site, offers extensive commentary and context throughout.